Anything Goes

The kids are not all right in “Skins.”

Sex, drugs, and alcohol are in the air in MTV’s series about suburban teen-age life.Credit Illustration by ISTVAN BANYAI

“Skins,” a dramatic series that began on MTV in January, may ring a bell with people who don’t watch MTV, or don’t even have children who watch MTV, because of the amount of attention it has received in the media. The series depicts the lives of nine suburban teen-agers, and the picture it paints is an ugly wash of drugs, sex, and alcohol; adding to the show’s troubling reputation, some of its scenes, involving actors under the age of eighteen, have caused watchdogs to wonder whether child-pornography laws have been violated. (To be on the safe side, MTV made some cuts and alterations after a couple of episodes aired.) The Parents Television Council mounted a campaign even before the show premièred, trying to pressure advertisers into bowing out. So far, six have done so, and the P.T.C. is still going at it; at the top of the home page of its Web site, it exhorts us to “TAKE ACTION! Contact Clearasil About Their Sponsorship of Skins!”

Some viewers will decide that the show at least borders on pornography, an assessment that is, of course, their right to make. It’s also an assessment that MTV has, in a way, encouraged. The promotional images that the network sent out into the world to draw eyeballs to “Skins” are provocative, if not titillating—they show the cast lying together in a cluster, wearing almost nothing, and looking at the camera with expressions that range from blasé to dazed. The amount of exposed skin in the pictures grabs your attention, and sorting out the pile of bodies requires you to linger on them. What’s going on? A close look at the photograph I’ve seen most often shows that the uncovered body parts are ones we see all the time—girls’ legs, necks, and arms, and boys’ arms and chests. But sex is definitely in the air. One girl has her tongue on a boy’s neck while her eyes are on the camera. That is a convention of porn—a woman doing things to a man while staring dead-eyed at the viewer. These kids might as well be naked: they don’t care who sees them, and they don’t care what people think. They’re in their own world, beyond the reach of adults. Which means that the adults in their lives have done something very wrong—and what adult wouldn’t be threatened by that message?

“Skins” is a remake of a British series, created by the father-son team of Bryan Elsley and Jamie Brittain, which is now in its fifth season. (The title is British slang for cigarette rolling papers.) Unusually for such cases, the U.K. creative team is genuinely involved in the American remake and is using the same basic approach here as in England—hiring mostly non-actors and employing teen-agers as writers and consultants. The original is set in the port city of Bristol; the American version takes place in an unnamed northern city and was filmed in Toronto. While Canada is not exactly what we think of as a foreign country, I did register the feeling that I was watching things happening elsewhere, outside the country I live in. Perhaps that’s why, even though MTV touts the series as a frank look at teen-age life today, I had the over-all sense that the show was not entirely real. And, of course, it isn’t—it’s a scripted series. But if you’ve seen any of the British version, which is shown here on BBC America, the Stateside iteration feels a little soft around the edges. One tries to avoid overusing the word “gritty” in characterizing a certain kind of British show, but, even apart from subject matter, there is an unsparing quality to much British drama, and it requires viewers to tolerate a high level of discomfort. The American “Skins” doesn’t really ask that of us.

Each episode focusses on the life of one member of the group, and the first episode cleverly establishes each character’s identity. Tony (James Newman) gets out of bed and watches a naked woman in a window across the street, who meets his gaze. Then, seeing his dishevelled, spectral-looking sister below, returning home from a night out, he creates a diversion so that his parents don’t notice her sneaking into the house. Tony is brazen, confident, an operator. As he walks to school, he works his phone like a dealmaker—switching between calls to his girlfriend and other members of the group to enlist them in a plan to help his best friend lose his virginity before he turns seventeen. We see each kid answering Tony’s call: one is practicing the trumpet; one is in a mosque, praying; one is being tossed around at cheerleading practice; and his girlfriend is in her bathroom, getting ready for school. Tony’s charm and cheek get to be a bit much—except to his friend Stanley (Daniel Flaherty), the slow developer, a rumpled, inarticulate kid with his hair hanging perpetually in one eye, who nearly idolizes him.

But Tony actually has more claim to authority over his peers than most of the adults do. The teachers we see at school are jokes: one, a young woman who teaches social sciences, and whom the students address by her first name, cries profusely as a student reads a paper on grief; another thinks of himself as the cool teacher and, accordingly, acts like an ass. The therapists treating one girl, Cadie (Britne Oldford), are sketch-comedy parodies of shrinks. One of them, chiding Cadie for not enjoying her youth, says, “My vagina has the look and feel of turkey jerky. I would do anything to be seventeen again.”

Tea (Sofia Black-D’Elia), the cheerleader, is gay, and though she’s sexually active, she can’t seem to get what she’s really looking for. She pushes away a girl she has just slept with, saying that she doesn’t want a relationship, “because nobody matches up to me.” Later, she says to Tony, “Is it too much to ask for someone to be interesting?” The two spark each other—they’re the most verbal members of the group, and they share a sense of apartness—and this creates some sexual confusion. One of the elements of “Skins” that might disturb adults is the kids’ sexual fluidity. They seem mercurial, impossible to get a handle on, as they work out their identities. This is as discomfiting to watch on TV as it is to experience—as a parent or as a teen-ager—in real life. But the sex isn’t explicit, and, while there’s a lot of exposed flesh, and we know when characters are masturbating, no no-nos are seen, as they are in the British version. I found the casual, constant drug use much more alarming. The way the characters pop pills is like mindless snacking—they’ll take anything. Cadie takes purple pills; Chris (Jesse Carere, a near-ringer for Vinny, of MTV’s “Jersey Shore”), a sweet boy who’s been abandoned by his mother, takes, just for the hell of it, too many erection-aiding pills, with obvious results.

However realistic “Skins” is, and however representative of teen-agers in general, its real target—its real audience—is parents, who are portrayed as neglectful, narcissistic, mean, or absent. In the British “Skins,” there’s a sense that society is partly at fault for screwing up the kids. Since the American version isn’t set anywhere in particular, there’s no context for the discontent, no explanation for dysfunction other than cracked family lives. But the parental characters are ridiculous and mostly unbelievable. That they’re over the top may be deliberate, a means of calling attention to the need for parents to be grownups. Maybe “Skins” should be congratulated for standing up for family values. ♦